ABSTRACT
Portuguese is a widely scattered language with different situations in the various geographical settings where it is spoken, ranging between mother tongue, second language, national language, heritage language or international language of culture and communication. This fact led to its classification as a pluricentric language, a feature that strongly influences research on the matter. Many studies adopt a comparative view of linguistic variants across national varieties of Portuguese, assuming it does not have only one official standard norm. Meanwhile, dialect variation inside Portugal is also considered and described by current sociolinguistic studies, alongside with the social value of linguistic variants. To cover these several aspects, the chapter is divided in four sections. The first section, “Portuguese language: an overview” portrays the current major features of the Portuguese diaspora; the second, “Sociolinguistic studies in Portugal”, addresses the prevailing research trends in Portugal; the third, “Studies on other sociolinguistic aspects of Portuguese” refers to sociolinguistic studies on areas apart from linguistic variation; finally, the fourth section points to “Future directions” for sociolinguistic studies in Portugal.
